Eldönthetetlennek

Eldönthetetlennek is a Hungarian word that translates to "undecidable" in English. It refers to a proposition or a problem that cannot be proven or disproven within a given formal system or set of axioms. In logic and computer science, the concept of undecidability is fundamental.

The idea of undecidability gained prominence with the work of mathematicians and logicians like Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Gödel's incompleteness theorems demonstrated that in any consistent formal system strong enough to contain basic arithmetic, there will always be true statements that cannot be proven within that system. This implies the existence of undecidable propositions.

Alan Turing's work on computability further solidified the concept. He proved the existence of the Halting Problem, which is a classic example of an undecidable problem in computer science. The Halting Problem asks whether it is possible to determine, for an arbitrary program and an arbitrary input, whether the program will eventually stop or continue to run forever. Turing showed that no general algorithm can solve this problem for all possible program-input pairs.

The implications of undecidability are far-reaching. It sets inherent limits on what can be known or computed. In mathematics, it means there are truths that lie beyond formal proof. In computer science, it highlights the boundaries of algorithmic problem-solving, indicating that certain tasks are fundamentally impossible to automate completely. The study of undecidable problems helps to understand the fundamental nature of computation and logic.